Secret Legacy Read Free Page A

fingers around Sarah’s. It was an inappropriate gesture between an objective Watcher and his principal, but he couldn’t let go. “Let someone help you before it’s too late.”
    A child’s desperate pleas echoed through their minds.
    “Move!” A rush of dark hair, a wave of fury, announcedMadeline’s presence. She shoved herself between Richard and her twin. “What have you done to her?”
    “The dream reached me all the way in the control room.” Richard staggered from losing his physical connection with Sarah. He fought to maintain their psychic link. “We have to get her mind under control, or I’ll need to alert the Brotherhood.”
    Madeline took the hand he’d dropped. He sensed her attempting to send her mind into her sister’s. When the twins were linked in a projection, Madeline’s control balanced Sarah’s more impulsive gifts.
    “She won’t let me in.” Madeline glared over her shoulder. “What is she doing dreaming outside the lab?”
    Richard had no answers. Sarah’s daily drug regimen shouldn’t have allowed a dream state without his intervention. And without his monitors and specialized equipment, he had no way to buffer Sarah’s mind from the dream matrix’s pull.
    “Tell me what you hear,” he demanded. “The screams from her ocean sequence. I felt them—”
    “Luring her to her death . . .” Madeline’s and Sarah’s coloring was identical. Their toned bodies. The classic curves of their beautiful faces. It was almost as if Sarah were standing before him, dressed in rumpled pajamas, strong and safe and spitting mad.
    Madeline’s forehead wrinkled.
    He realized he was staring.
    She turned back to Sarah.
    “I . . . I think the cries are the same,” she said. During the twins’ dream work, Madeline had reported hearing faint sounds that could have come from Sarah’s phantom child. “A little girl needing help. But . . . something elseis moving through the ocean, trapping Sarah in the nightmare. Or maybe she doesn’t want to let the water go this time. I don’t know . . .”
    Richard rounded the bed to Sarah’s other side. “In the last twenty-four hours, we’ve had two untraceable intelligence breaches. Your sister’s mind is being seen as the most likely source of a leak to the center, even before the council hears that her dreams have broken from our control.”
    “And she’s guilty until proven innocent, because of how badly your
brotherhood
mishandled protecting us from Tad Ruebens?”
    “Unfortunately, yes.”
    Sarah’s head jerked. Her eyes darted side to side behind their closed lids. Her breathing grew choppier.
    Her physical responses to dream stimuli should have been suppressed by her REM rhythms. But whatever was happening in the nightmare was breaking through. Richard took her wrist in his fingers, needing to feel her pulse. Needing her touch again, period. Her heart was beating too faintly. Too fast. It wouldn’t absorb much more abuse. Her head jerked again.
    Maddie cupped Sarah’s face between her hands, deepening their connection. She gasped and staggered backward. Sarah shuddered.
    “Stop . . .” Madeline pressed her fists to her own temples. “Make the screaming stop. I can’t breathe. Sarah . . . she can’t breathe.”
    “Take her hand again.” Richard forced his own lungs to expand.
    He’d seen a stronger flash of Sarah’s nightmare, felt her more clearly, when he and Madeline were both touchingher. Breathing deeply, he narrowed his focus to Made-line’s terrified gaze and downshifted to the mission tactics that had saved his life countless times since he’d left behind the reckless teenager he’d once been and became a Watcher.
    Nothing existed except completing the mission before him. His breath came in on the thought. He exhaled as the next took hold. There was no moment but now.
Inhale.
No feelings except determination.
Exhale.
Confidence. Acceptance.
Inhale.
No resistance. No regret.
    “We have to get into the dream